Welcome to Bretby Parish Council’s web site. The site will be kept under review and will be developed further. Your comments are always welcome and you should do this by using the contact form.
Bretby Parish Council is responsible for overseeing, advising and taking decisions on many aspects of parish life. The Parish Council is the first tier of local government and members are elected every four years. The Parish Council has very little real power – our key role is to represent the interests of local residents and to lobby those authorities that do have the power and responsibility to get things done such as the District and County Councils. In this Parish, a meeting will typically discuss planning applications, the state of public footpaths, and reports from District and County Councils. Map of the parish (6.3MB pdf).
Bretby is a village in the south of Derbyshire, England, north of Swadlincote and east of Burton upon Trent, on the border between Derbyshire and Staffordshire. The name means “dwelling place of Britons”. There is a secondary settlement known as Stanhope Bretby – this was the site of a colliery.
The Parish has 2 pubs, a conference centre with hotel, St. Wystans Church, a garden centre and a car/van hire centre.
Bretby is one of the most southerly villages in Derbyshire, reachable only by narrow leafy lanes. The Parish population in 1991 was 783. It was first mentioned in Domesday as an agricultural settlement around a green, and this remains the core of the village but there is a secondary settlement called Stanhope Bretby, for a long time the site of Bretby Colliery. Mining was a feature of life here for about 100 years but the only connection now is with the British Coal’s research Establishment at the Bretby Business Park.
In a field called Castle Field, a series of pronounched ridges and ditches can be seen, the only reminder of Bretby Castle, built in the 13th Century, a large fortified manor house surrounded by a moat. The Castle was demolished in the reign of James the 1st when permission was granted for a mansion to be built in a newly enclosed park of 600 acres. The ornamental gardens created there by the 2nd Earl of Chesterfield were reputed to have been second only to Versailles. Only the Hall and lakes remain. One of the owners of the estate was Lord Carnarvon the Egyptologist, who sold the property to finace the famous expedition in search of the tomb of Tutankhamun, the boy king. The present Hall was purchased in 1926 by the Derbyshire County Council for use as a hospital and remained an orthopaedic hospital till the 1990’s, the hall and grounds then being sold to developers to provide private residential units.
The 5th Earl of Chesterfield rebuilt the farmhouses and cottages in the early part of the 19th century, and they are still in the village today, some bearing the dates between 1805 – 1815. Behind the green, a path leads past a well worn set of stocks to St Wystan’s Church which contains a small brass plate to Benjamin Disraeli, once a regular visitor of the Chesterfields.
Places to visit include Bretby Nurseries, which is located on the outskirts of the village and Burton on Trent Golf Club, which can be found in Stanhope Bretby.
The view from Mount Bretby:
